Are Data Center Professionals Using Outsourcing to Meet Capacity?

Why are so many data centers now outsourcing? A new data center can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and be time-consuming to build. On top of that, according to the Uptime Institute, in its annual data center survey, more than a third of the large companies it surveyed (36%) expect to run out of capacity in at least one of their data centers over the next 18 months.

Server consolidation and upgrading of power and cooling equipment are the primary ways the companies said they would boost their capacity, the survey showed. But 29% said they plan to lease collocation space, while 20% will move workloads to the cloud.

A separate study commissioned by Digital Realty Trust, which builds and operates data centers for third parties, showed a similar trend. Of the respondents who planned to expand their data center capacity in 2011, 60% said they would lease space from a third party rather than build their own data center. That was an increase of 7% over last year, which follows an upward trend over the past few years.

So what do you think about these studies? Is this outsourcing market trend data Hype (not accurate) or Ripe? We’d love to hear your experiences with outsourcing data centers in the comments below.